A Masterpiece of Dream Logic: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron

There’s a moment about three-quarters of the way through The Boy and the Heron when the young protagonist, Mahito, and a companion, make their way down a rough-hewn stairway carved into a crevasse. A waterfall cascades beside them; other people bustle about. And there, for a few seconds, a rainbow shimmers when light hits the waterfall.

This is not a spoiler. It’s not a pivotal moment, the rainbow doesn’t suddenly turn into a fantastical creature or a portal to another world—it’s just a rainbow (if a rainbow can ever be just a rainbow) but Miyazaki, or a member of his team, took the time to draw and color that rainbow, to get the shading just right. Mahito and his friend don’t even notice it.

It’s there for us.

I’m going to talk about The Boy and the Heron in terms of theme and tone, because I don’t want to spoil the experience for anyone who has yet to see it.

The Boy and the Heron is the most perfect distillation of dream logic I’ve ever seen on film. Even while we’re still in the “real” world, Miyazaki drops us into Mahito’s dreams with no warning or indication, which means that we’re experiencing life along with Mahito the way a child would. Sometimes you fall asleep in the back of the car, or on the floor in front of the TV, and wake up in your own bed. Mahito, who is coping with some heavy trauma, is sometimes trapped in terrible nightmares before waking into a life he doesn’t much want. And that’s before he embarks on a rescue mission into an unknown alternate world.

This is Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length fantasy since Ponyo—and this one’s definitely for older kids and adults. From the opening scene, The Boy and the Heron wrestles with mourning, irrevocable change, and death. World War II has already been raging for a few years when Mahito Maki’s mother dies in a fire, and it’s only one year later that his father Shoichi moves both of them to the country, both to be closer to the family factory, and to join Natsuko, Mahito’s auntie-turned-brand-new-stepmother, already enormously pregnant with Mahito’s looming younger sibling. And while the boy tries to keep up a polite, calm exterior, he’s furious, grief-stricken, and troubled by dark dreams of his mother’s death.

He’s also haunted by the Grey Heron—called “that nosy heron” in the subtitled version—who seems to watch his every move, and even comes into the house to confront him. The heron mocks him, and challenges the personality he presents to the rest of the household. But his most troubling act comes later: he speaks with a human voice, and insists that Mahito’s mother is still alive. Will Mahito follow him into what may be a trap to see for himself? Or is this the dream of a boy who can’t accept his loss and grow into a new life?

Mahito is not a plucky Miyazaki character, or even a noble youth, or a cute kid, or a slightly sullen girl who needs to remember that there’s magic in the world. Mahito is kind of… prickly. He’s a troubled, heartsick, and grieving, but he’s also cold to people who want to be kind to him. Faced with a difficult new beginning, he chooses to make it worse. And the animal who becomes his guide is no cuddly Totoro or sarcastic cat—the Heron tells him flatly that he is not Mahito’s friend or ally, and at one point threatens to tear his heart out.

This is a dark, mature work. While the plot has little in common with Mononoke Hime, and it doesn’t have that film’s epic sweep, emotionally it feels almost as complex. It’s just that instead of diving into a deep mythological version of Japanese history, this is diving deep into the subconscious of a grieving boy that is also a Lewis Carroll-ish alternate universe with its own rules and structure. That’s what I meant about dream logic—if you allow the movie to work on you, which I’ve done twice now, it makes a kind of deep sense. The world shifts constantly, characters will talk about rules and taboos that were never mentioned before, and we’re expected to accept it and keep going:

You shouldn’t have opened that gate—now you have to walk backwards away from the cemetery in order to appease the dead—no looking behind you!

You have to gut the fish properly because the WaraWara need it to fly.

The stones don’t want you here, and you respect that, but you also know that you have to be here whether the stones like it or not.

The person in front of you is a young and vibrant pirate, and one of the aunties you left back in the other world—you don’t know how you know her name, but you do.

Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? was originally published in 1937 as part of a series of books for young people. I haven’t read the book, but apparently it’s a series of letters and musings between a boy and his beloved uncle, who exchange ideas on, well, how to live. The movie borrows the title, and a copy of How Do You Live? shows up in the movie at an important moment when Mahito, quite literally, has to decide how he’s going to live.

But the thing I find so interesting about the movie is that, if this was the original jumping off point for Miyazaki’s script, it leaves the book’s focus on all the store of small details of daily life, Japanese culture, and getting along at school to instead leap into a fantastic world of symbols and unknowable rules, that nevertheless do teach Mahito how to live as he makes his way. I recently watched a documentary about Jon Batiste called American Symphony, and at one point Batiste says: “What we love about music is not that it sounds good; what we love about music is that it sounds inevitable.” That is what I felt watching The Boy and the Heron. I’m not sure where it stands in Miyazaki’s ouevre, or if it’s that’s even a relevant question, but this one—maybe most like Totoro for me—felt inevitable. With each new challenge or creature that Mahito encounters I felt a click in my brain that it was the only challenge or creature. Each time the rules changed it made sense to me in the way my dreams make sense while I’m in them.

I’m not sure there’s anyone else working in film today who could pull this off.

I was lucky enough to see The Boy and the Heron in Japanese with English subtitles as part of the New York Film Festival in September, and, because it’s already out in New York, I got to see the English language dub before I finished my review. (I tend not to watch dubs, but I do love the Ghibli ones—how can I say no to fellow Pittsburgher Michael Keaton as Porco Rosso?) And while I think I like the subtitled version slightly more, The Boy and the Heron has an excellent dub. Christian Bale comes back to Ghibli-land to voice Mahito’s father, with a really fun accent. Luca Padovan is excellent in the lead, as is Soma Santoki in the original. Florence Pugh and Ko Shibasaki are both absolutely delightful as Kiriko, and obviously Mark Hamill brings weirdness and gravitas to the Great-Grand-Uncle. But the reason I wanted to see the dub before I finished the review was Robert Pattinson as the Heron. I became a fan of Robert Pattinson about one minute into his first scene in The Lost City of Z, and ever since then it‘s been so fun to watch him run full tilt into being A Weird Guy In Interesting Movies. Here he had a chance to go for it as the voice of the Heron. The original voice, Masaki Suda, was weird and gnarled and sinister (apparently Miyazaki apologized for writing such a strange part?) and Pattinson brings all that to the role while, I think, making it a little more comic. There were a lot of laughs in my theater, which was welcome in such a dark story.

There is an element of Miyazaki remix here that I found fascinating.

There is a magical fire spirit that recalls Calcifer but takes things in a VERY different direction; on top of once-and-forever Howl joining the English voice cast, there’s another riff on the Moving Castle itself—a magical structure whose doors open onto many times and lands; the magical structure is also reminiscent of the Castle of Cagliostro; there is a different magical structure of immense power that hovers over the ground, as in Laputa; the WaraWara reminded me of both Mononoke Hime’s Kodama and Totoro’s Soot Sprites—but here, too, the film takes these creatures go in a very different, more serious direction than their predecessors; a sullen kid has to rescue a parental figure, as in Spirited Away; there is a magical arrow that knows how to find its mark, just like Prince Ashitaka’s arrows sometimes can.

I’m not mentioning these things to say that Miyazaki is repeating himself, however, far from it: each of these elements is taken in a new and startling direction. It’s also fascinating to me that the Miyazaki family’s love of Ursula K Le Guin is on full display—for about five minutes, The Boy and the Heron is the best adaptation of The Farthest Shore we’re ever gonna get.

And I didn’t even get to how this film understand that parakeets, even though they may love you, yearn for the taste of human flesh.

I think the thing that I’m circling is that this movie, on the surface, is escapism. It follows a child into a Wonderland. But it uses the strange logic of that wonderland to ask the most important questions a human can ask: How do you create a just world? Why do we want to create at all? Is there any point in creation, when everything created will inevitably collapse into ruin and death? And because this is Miyazaki, the movie doesn’t give you easy answers. It sends you out into our world with the questions still rattling in your head.

Leah Schnelbach hopes their retirement is half as creative and full of incredible work as Miyazaki’s has been. Come talk to them on zombie twitter or Blue Sky or wherever!